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Jarai (Elephant passage in the Vietnam’s giungle) - 1992
Jarai (Elephant passage in the Vietnam’s giungle) - 1992
Jacek Pałkiewicz2006-06-17 16:24:12
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Jarai
We are in the province of GiaLai, in the jungle few kilometers from the border with the Cambodia, to find one of the 55 ethnic minorities that populate Vietnam.
Jarai, called by the french Montagnard and from the vetnamitis "moi", that means wild, they are few thousand. They had been anchoring for 2 thousand years on the highland Annamitico, they have never been in good relationships with the Vietnamese.
Their life is stamped more to a "rough simplicity", to an economy of pure survival. They live of primitive forms of agriculture and hunting. The men still use the same crossbows and arrows poisoned as they made their ancestors.
The Last Adventure In Vietnam
An exceptional expedition on elephant back among the Jarai, the ethnic group that survived in the Gia Lai jungle
From here to the Cambodian border it only takes a few hours. The trail, beaten by elephants, suddenly turns just before getting into the neighboring country and keeps on the Vietnamese side of the border. The forest, thriving with bamboo plants, offers an extraordinary variety of colors: the yellow in all its nuances, the light green of the buds and the brown of the trunks. Some of these trunks are as high as a four-story building.
Thorns and briars makes the trail difficult. After crossing one more river, almost dry in this season, we arrive to a small cemetery guarded by wooden statues of stylized animals, among which the elephant. A snow-white water buffalo skull, meant to drive away the evil spirits, reminds us that we are on sacred ground. Several big jars buried in the ground and filled with offerings to the Gods (in some of them there is fruit, still pretty fresh) show that the area is inhabited by humans. In fact, ten minutes away, elephants and men enter a small village built on pilings, where live the Jarai, one of the 54 Vietnam's ethnic minorities, who thanks to the isolation in which
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See photographs from:
Vietnam Gallery
